The Trail to Buddha's Mirror (5 page)

I love a man who takes an honest bribe, Neal thought.

Neal took his time getting down Telegraph Hill. He strolled down Greenwich Street onto Columbus Avenue, stopped to admire the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul’s terra-cotta towers, and took a seat on a bench in Columbus Square. He shared the bench with two old men who were chatting amiably in Italian. The seat gave him a nice view of the park, where he saw young mothers pushing baby carriages, older Chinese people doing t‘ai chi, and still older Italian women, dressed in black, tossing bread crumbs to pigeons. He liked what he saw, but he liked what he didn’t see even better: no Benchpress, no small groups of Benchpress’s friends and associates searching for a young white guy in a blue blazer and khaki slacks. Trust is one thing, he thought, stupidity is another.

He gave it five minutes on the bench before moving on down Columbus toward the corner of Broadway. Bypassing a half-dozen Italian cafés, bakeries, and espresso bars—there would be time for those later—he headed straight for the City Lights Bookstore.

Neal had known about the City Lights Bookstore long before he had ever visited it. What Shakespeare and Company was to the Lost Generation, City Lights was to the Beat Generation. It was a literary candle in the window that showed the way back from Kesey to Kerouac, and in a sense back to Smollett and Johnson and old Lazarillo des Tormes.

Mostly it was just a goddamn good bookstore that had tables and chairs downstairs where people were encouraged to sit down and actually read books. There were no smarmy signs about its being a business and not a library. Consequently, it was both a pleasure and a privilege to buy a book from City Lights, and that was part of what Neal had in mind.

He stepped through the narrow doorway, nodded a greeting to the clerk at the counter, and headed down the rickety wooden stairs to the basement. Several other pilgrims were browsing the shelves, rapt in their perusal of sections labeled “Counterculture,” which held treasures not easily found in Cleveland, Montgomery, or New York.

He did a little browsing himself, settled on a paperback copy of Edward Abbey’s
Desert Solitaire,
and sat down at a table. He spent a few minutes enjoying Abbey and then discovered an itch that required scratching on the sole of his left foot. He took off his loafer, removed the notepad and ticket stubs, and put them on the table. One of the great things about City Lights was that nobody cared what you spent your time looking at.

He started with the notepad, which didn’t take much time because there was nothing written on it, nor were there any impressions on the top or second pages. So far, no good.

The ticket stubs were more interesting, each being proof of purchase of a $3.50 round-trip fare from Blue Line Transportation on the Number four bus. Six of them, each from last week. Neal didn’t know where the Number four bus went, but it couldn’t be that far at $3.50. Where the hell could Pendleton have been commuting to? Or was it Lila? A commuting hooker?

Neal stuck the tickets and pad back in his pocket, bought the Bank the copy of
Desert Solitaire,
and headed back up Columbus. He knew exactly what he needed to follow up the lead, and found it at a sidewalk café called La Figaro, where he ordered a double iced espresso and a slice of chocolate cake. Sugar, caffeine, and carbohydrates were exactly the brain food he needed to inspire him, and he was sitting outside reveling in self-indulgence and Edward Abbey when he felt a shadow looming over his shoulder and heard a voice ask, “So, you have any more money for me?”

Neal looked up at him and smiled.

A. Brian Crowe hadn’t changed much. He still hung out in the same cafés. He was still tall and skinny, still sported shoulder-length blond hair, and still dressed all in black. Even carried the same black satin cape draped over his shoulder.

“Are there more corporate giants wanting to film their obscenities in front of my art?” Crowe asked.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then you could at least offer me an espresso.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

Crowe signaled the waitress, who headed straight for the espresso machine. Crowe was obviously no stranger to cadging drinks at La Figaro.

“How’s the life of a starving artist?” Neal asked when the coffee had been served.

“Fat,” Crowe answered. He swirled half the espresso around in his mouth, then jerked his head back suddenly and swallowed. He savored the aftertaste, then jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at a skyscraper down in the Financial District. “They wanted a sculpture for their lobby. They commissioned Crowe, who charged them an unconscionable fee, which they foolishly paid. Crowe bought his apartment.”

“You
bought
an apartment?”

“It was a very large sculpture,” he explained. He tilted the cup into his mouth again and knocked the coffee back. His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed, and he looked like a turkey swallowing raindrops. “It occupies a prominent place in a traffic pattern trod by the sensually enslaved but socially ambitious, some of whom have decided to attempt their climb up the social ladder clutching their very own Crowe. The monetary expression of their undying gratitude allows Crowe to live in the manner to which he has become accustomed.”

“Sun room? View of the bay?”

“In short, I am
in,
and therefore in the money. Buy me another espresso.” His long fingers whipped a card from his pocket.

“C’mon, Crowe!
Business cards?”

“You know a lot of corporate types, don’t you?”

“I guess the Sixties are really over.”

Crowe raised an eyebrow at the waitress, who quickly came over with two espressos. Crowe leaned over his cup and looked sadly at Neal. He dropped the artsy pose and said, “My three-piece-suit clients are always asking me to get them acid.
Acid!
I haven’t done acid since the first Monterey Festival.”

“So you’re off the bus?”

“And on the gravy train. The Sixties are over, the Seventies are on the downslide, and the Eighties are almost upon us. You want to be carrying some money into the Eighties. Remember that, young Neal. It’s about making money now.”

Neal took the card. “My clients don’t usually come to me looking for art, but …”

“Networking, you know? Networking gets the right people together with the right people.”

“The ‘right people,’ Crowe? You joining the country club next? You were a
communist,
for crying out loud!”

“I turned in my card. I’m thirty-eight years old, young Neal. I can’t work for rice and beans and dope anymore. One day I looked in the mirror and saw my happy hippie face differently. It looked pathetic. I was a tourist attraction, local color for the tourists who hadn’t figured out the hippie thing was already dead.

“So I quit doing art for art’s sake and started doing it for A. Brian Crowe’s sake. I learned some interesting things, like the fact that a corporation won’t even look at a piece that costs a thousand bucks, but will fight over the same piece when it costs ten thousand bucks. I just started adding zeros to my price tags. I got myself an agent and started going to parties and sipping white wine with the right people. You can call it selling out…. I call it
selling.”

Neal avoided his gaze. Crowe looked older. The fire in his eyes had become embers.

“It’s okay with me, Crowe.”

The artist snapped back into his role. He stood up, whirled his cape around his shoulders, and said, “Crowe’s address and phone number are on the card. Give Crowe a call. We’ll do dinner.”

Neal watched him stride out the door. A. Brian Crowe, flamboyant artist, counterculture hero, Gold Card member.

That’s all right, Neal thought. Every one of us is at least two people.

3

Neal got back to the Hopkins, found Blue Line Transportation in the Yellow Pages, dialed the number, and found out that the old Number four plied a route from downtown San Francisco to Mill Valley, where it dropped its passengers at “the Terminal Bookstore.” Neal wondered if the Terminal Bookstore specialized in texts for morticians, but was generally willing to ride any bus that ended its journey at a bookstore. He had an hour and a half to catch the two-twenty from Montgomery Street in the Financial District.

He went down to the gift shop in the hotel basement and picked up a guidebook to the Bay Area. The index told him that he could read about Mill Valley on page sixty-four, where he learned that Mill Valley was a charming little village in Marin County, nestled on the southern base of Mount Tamalpais, just a few minutes’ drive from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Neal bought a copy of the book and a bright blue vinyl tube bag that proclaimed “I Left My ♥ in San Francisco,” and headed back to his room.

He ordered a cheeseburger from room service and started to pack the tube bag. The last bus back from Mill Valley left at 9:00
P.M.
and seeing as he didn’t have any idea what he was going to do, he didn’t know if he’d be done doing it by then, so he packed for an overnight: a black sweater, black jeans, black tennis shoes, gloves, burglary kit, and two thousand dollars in cash. He took a quick shower, changed into a fresh shirt, and put his khaki slacks and all-purpose blue blazer, rep tie, and loafers back on.

The costume made him more forgettable than he was already. With his medium build, medium height, brown hair, and brown eyes, he could have been the poster boy for Anonymous Anonymous.

He wolfed down the eight-dollar cheeseburger, then took his tube bag, his paperback copy of
Ferdinand Count Fathom,
and his unremarkable looks and headed out to catch the two-twenty.

Like a lot of voyages, this one was born of desperation. There was no reason for him to expect that Pendleton and Lila should be in Mill Valley, and no way for him to locate them even if they were. But the tickets to Mill Valley were the only leads he had, so he might as well pursue them. The only other option was to put a call in to Friends and tell them he had blown it, and that was no option at all.

So he figured he’d just take the ride to Mill Valley, snoop around a little, and see what he could see. Maybe he’d have one of those rare instances of dumb luck and run into Pendleton on the bus. Maybe find him at the Terminal Bookstore, poring over the latest issue of
Chickenshit Illustrated
Maybe he’d waste an afternoon chasing a wild goose.

But there were worse fates than cruising across the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny California afternoon. After six months in the rain and fog of a Yorkshire moor, the blue sky and open vista made Neal a little giddy. His cynical heart raced a bit, his jaded New York eyes widened, and his sardonic agent-for-hire leer opened into a smile as he rolled across the bridge, the Pacific on the left, the Bay on the right.

Just a natural-born tourist on an outing, he thought as the bus pulled into Mill Valley. A chameleon, a mere ripple in the shadows: the unobserved observer.

He stood out like a hard-on in a harem.

Nobody in Mill Valley wore a tie, Neal saw, and if anyone wore a jacket, it had leather fringe on it. Everyone was wearing plaid cotton shirts with denim overalls, or denim workshirts and painter’s pants, or actual robes. And a lot of sandals, running shoes, and biker boots.

Neal, on the other hand, looked like a Young Republican in need of an enema. Like a Ronald Reagan delegate at a communist party meeting. Like a rookie insurance agent going to sell term-life to Abbie Hoffman.

As he stepped off the bus, the locals gathered around the Terminal Bookstore actually stared at him. He couldn’t have been any more conspicuous if he had been wearing a sandwich board reading,
UPTIGHT, UNCOOL, NON-JOGGING, MEAT-EATING, EAST COAST, URBAN NEOFASCIST WHO DOESN’T MEDITATE
. Even the mellow dogs lying under the benches pricked up their ears and started to whine with unaccustomed anxiety, as if expecting Neal to slip a leash on them or otherwise impede their freedom to revel the oneness of nature.

The intellectuals playing chess at the outdoor wooden tables paused in their deliberations to stare at Neal’s neckwear. A couple of the older, kinder ones shook their heads in the sadness of a dim memory when they themselves had been similarly encumbered. Three teenagers who were sharing a joint suddenly developed a need to scamper to the trash barrel, which was painted a deep forest green. A winsome young lady playing a wooden flute stopped her warbling and hugged her instrument tightly to her breasts, as if afraid that Neal might snatch it out of her hand and use it to beat a kitten to death.

Neal wished he were naked—he would have felt less self-conscious. But there he stood, fully clad, in beautiful Mill Valley.

And it was beautiful, set in a hollow edged by steep hills made green with pines, cedars and redwoods. Houses built from these native woods blended into the slopes, and their cantilevered decks kept watch over the village. Coffee shops, restaurants, and art studios framed the main square, which was actually a triangle, the apex of which was occupied by the Terminal Bookstore.

The fast-running brook that bordered the west side of the village provided a natural air-conditioning effect; the air was cool and crisp—even cold in the shadows—and people found spots in the sunshine to sit and consider the world. The world seemed a pretty nice place from Mill Valley, as if its citizens had gotten the Sixties right, frozen the best parts of it here, and made them work. The world seemed pretty nice, that is, unless you were wearing a button-down oxford shirt, blue blazer, and polished black loafers.

Neal sought cover in a coffee shop across the street. It had floor-to-ceiling picture windows on three sides. The walls, floors, and counters were made of polished pine, and wooden stools were set by the wraparound bar. A middle-aged blond women smiled at him as he walked in, attractive wrinkles of laughter and sunshine crinkling around her brown eyes. She was wearing a fire-engine red chamois shirt over faded denims.

“What would you like?” she asked.

“One black coffee to go,”